An orphaned girl is dragged into the underworld for a raucous party. Made 4 years before Coco.
Tag Archives: Animation
SATURDAY SHORT: THE REALM BEYOND REASON (2020)
Two teen boys get jobs at a pizza boys delivery service to raise some extra cash, but all is not as it seems in… the Realm Beyond Reason!
Happy Halloween!
CHANNEL 366: UZUMAKI (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Hiroshi Nagahama, Yûji Moriyama
FEATURING: Uki Satake, Shin’ichirô Miki; Abby Trott, Robbie Daymond (English dub)
PLOT: Residents of a small Japanese town are increasingly haunted by spirals.
COMMENTS: Most horror story monsters are inspired by symbols of death, disease, and predation, not unthreatening geometric shapes like the humble spiral. Leave it to eerie manga star Junjo Ito to choose the spiral as his avatar of evil. Uzumaki (which had previously been adapted as a live-action feature) plumbs every possible devious iteration of the humble coil; it shows up in the story as whirlwinds, whirlpools, DNA, snail’s shells, hair curls, staircases, mosquito swarms, corkscrews, springs, and the twisted, intertwined bodies of snakes (and people). Watch with disquietude as everyday objects in the town gradually get twisted as the story spirals towards its grim conclusion.
The bizarre antagonist is not the only weird element here. The originally-serialized story lurches forward as a series of vignettes, with a threatening new spiral form dominating each mini-arc. In between episodes, normality resets. After the first girl’s head dissolves into a spiral, we would think the two high school protagonists would flee town; instead, the incident is never mentioned again. After the first kid turns into a human-snail hybrid, you would think the town would panic; instead, they accept it as the new normal, building a pen for the newly-minted escargot boy to live in. The commonsense idea of fleeing the town doesn’t even arise until the second episode, when one pair of aspiring refugees are frustrated in their attempt—but our main characters never even attempt to leave until the final episode, when the narrative finally proffers an explanation for their inability to escape. A particularly intense, vampire-adjacent incident dominates the third episode, but again, after a jarring edit, this horror is entirely forgotten. The characters’ incapacity—and their resigned unwillingness—to escape their situation lends the story an especially irrational, nightmarish quality. In fact, Uzuamki‘s entire structure, oscillating between grotesque visions and uneasy pseudo-normality, suggests madness; perhaps our main characters are actually trapped inside their own obsessive delusions, imagining spirals everywhere.
The art style is done entirely in black and white and imitates the intricate linework of Ito’s original drawings, sometimes recreating particularly bizarre panels. When animated, the absurdity of some of Ito’s visions—a dramatically curling tongue, a pair of eyeballs rotating independently—can be as weirdly comic as they are frightening. But the artwork is almost always strange and affecting, no matter the overall emotional effect. Much was made in anime fandom of the fact that the animation quality declines as the series progresses (probably due to budgetary mismanagement). By the final episode, the directors and producers aren’t even credited. I think that this complaint is mostly overstated, at least for the average viewer. I noted the decline in the cartoon’s fluidity and detail with each new episode, but it wasn’t as drastic as I feared; if I hadn’t been forewarned, I’m not sure how much I would have noticed. Perhaps I benefited from having my expectations lowered; perhaps you will, too. Although Uzumaki hobbles a bit on the way to the finish line, it eventually crosses it. It’s not the wall-to-wall masterpiece the first episode promised, but I wouldn’t say it exactly circles the drain, either.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: WAVE TWISTERS (2001)
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AKA DJ Qbert’s Wave Twisters
DIRECTED BY: Syd Garon, Eric Henry
FEATURING: DJ Qbert, Yoga Frog, D-Styles, Flare, Buckethead
PLOT: When the dastardly Lord Ook deprives Arrow Town of the Four Lost Arts of Hip Hop — rhyming, scratching, breaking, and graffiti — it’s up to an intergalactic crew of dentists to liberate the town through the power of sick beats.
COMMENTS: Faced with a video album based on the musical stylings of a national and world champion DJ known as the Jimi Hendrix of the turntable, the last thing I would have expected was a coherent narrative. Yet that is what we get in Wave Twisters, a hip-hop sci-fi musical in which rapid-fire scratching and carefully chosen radio drama samples combine to tell a story that would have been at home in the days of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. From the outset, the movie’s strongest claim to weirdness is that it’s so unexpectedly linear and focused.
Don’t mistake that for any pretensions of depth. The story would not be out of place alongside the cheap sci-fi serials shot in Bronson Canyon in the 40s and 50s; strange aliens attack, and a group of square-jawed heroes save the day, complete with cliff-hanging chapters that slowly advance the conflict. It remains first and foremost a platform for the real star, DJ Qbert’s scratching wizardry. Qbert’s album came first, and it was up to directors Garon and Henry and co-writer/art director Doug Cunningham to transform the soundscape into a visual tale, while leaving Qbert’s original work intact. Considering the challenge, the result is impressive, with a charming comic book feel that takes advantage of limited animation. The images lend a broader sense of humor to Qbert’s sardonic wit; the DJ may have enjoyed finding a snippet of a classic serial villain declaring, “I am the Red Worm!,” but it’s the filmmakers who add lascivious gloss by putting that dialogue in the mouth of a symbiotic parasite residing in the navel of a baby in a luchador mask.
Perversely, it’s the beats that inadvertently drag down the story. With all the tunes working at roughly the same BPM, there’s not much variety in the energy, and you can feel the story slowing down to keep pace with the score. For example, a side trip wherein graffiti expert Honey is captured by the enemy is intriguing, especially as she is transformed into an ostrich. It looks cool, but it’s a dead end for the plot, and overlong as an eye-catching visual. Similarly, set pieces like an assassin stalking the crew down a hallway are tense for the first few seconds, but in short order the repetition becomes tiring. The visuals are in sync with the soundscape, but they never quite harmonize.
If nothing else, Wave Twisters is worth the watch to see Qbert and his colleagues in action. Amusingly, they are deployed in live action as agents of the bad guys, using their rapid-fire scratches and sonic tweaks as weapons against enemies of the state, but it’s remarkable watching them do their thing at breakneck speed. If it takes a wacky tale from the Golden Age of Science Fiction to show off the awesome instrumental power of the turntable, then by all means, get those dentists to space on the double.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Katie. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
CAPSULE: THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)
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DIRECTED BY: François Girard
FEATURING: Colm Feore
PLOT: A patchwork of short vignettes explores the allure of the eccentric piano virtuoso.
COMMENTS: I discovered my all-time favorite recording, Glenn Gould’s complete “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould at about the same time. I can’t definitively remember which I encountered first: my guess would be Girard’s film, because it is such an effective advertisement for Gould’s genius that it seems likely to have inspired a purchase. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that I saw there was a film out about this marvelous pianist who accompanied his nimble fingers with ecstatic spontaneous humming, breathing humanity into Bach’s precise baroque miniatures, and knew I had to learn more about this man. I do know that Gould’s “Clavier” was reissued in on CD in 1993, likely to coincide with this film, and I love to imagine I actually picked up that set from Tower Records and rented a VHS of Thirty Two Films from my local mom and pop video store on the same weekend in 1993 or 1994.
The movie does what it says on the tin (although some might object to calling the closing credits a “short film.”) The sequences break down into four main categories: documentary-style interviews with friends and co-workers, dramatic reenactments of events in the pianist’s life, adaptations of Gould’s own works, and abstract experimental sketches. The interviews are illuminating, and give the film its hybrid documentary character. The dramatic scenes form the bulk of the movie. They follow in a roughly chronological format, but do not tell a continuing story: each is a standalone vignette. Memorable moments show Gould corralling his hotel chambermaid to listen to his hot-off-the-presses LP and the Gould mesmerized by contrapuntal conversations he hears in a diner. A performance of “String Quartet, Opus 1,” one of his few original compositions, an excerpt from the word collage “The Idea of North,” and a dramatization of a portion of his puckish essay “Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould” ground us in the legend’s actual creative output. The experimental shorts constitute the most intriguing category, although there are only five or six of them (considering how you count). They include closeups of Gould’s own CD318 piano in action, hammers striking the soundboard, illustrating the physical geometry of the sonic construction; a scene of Gould playing the piano in x-ray vision; and “Gould Meets McLaren,” a 1969 animated short (originally entitled “Spheres”) that shows globes popping into existence, dancing symmetrically across the screen, and dividing like eggs undergoing musical mitosis as Gould plays a Bach fugue.
I once defined bopic as “a movie genre that’s not accurate enough to be documentary or interesting enough to be fiction.” One of the most formulaic and cliched film formats, the celebrity biography only really works when it is heavily fictionalized, as in Amadeus or Lisztomania (which, coincidentally, both involve classical musicians). Thirty Two Short Films shatters the mold of this generally insipid movie genre. There are enough talking head reminiscences to capture the spirit of the man, but not so many that it appears lazy. Girard solves the genre’s central problem—the fact that messy human lives rarely fit neatly into three act structures with unified themes—by ignoring narrative almost entirely. This collage portraiture method captures its subject more faithfully than a “realist” approach would. When we think back on people we know, we recall them as a collection of moments and characteristics; we don’t think of them as a contiguous life story. Glenn Gould was the piano prodigy and the hypochondriac and the man who went everywhere wrapped in a coat and gloves and scarf and the man who called up his friends late at night and talked their ears off and the virtuoso who developed a hatred for performing and the monster who put ketchup on his eggs and the genius and the possibly asexual hermit. He is at least thirty two separate stories, and this seemingly chaotic collection of vignettes creates a portrait of a real person far better than a tick-tock chronology or a forced storyline would. Plus, the music is, naturally, great, and what Gould himself likely would have wanted us to focus on; his passion shines through every segment, turning almost anyone into a classical music fan for at least 90 minutes. Glenn Gould is a strong contender for the greatest biopic ever made.
Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould entered the Criterion Collection in June 2025 on 4K UHD and Blu-ray. Of course it is a new 4K director approved transfer. Of course it comes with a booklet (a nice fold out broadsheet with titles and scenes from the shorts on the other side) with an informative essay (from Michael Koresky.) Of course it has a director’s commentary (Girard is joined by co-writer Don McKellar). Other extras include a thirty minute conversation between Girard and fellow Canadian director Atom Egoyan, archival interviews with star Colm Feore and producer Niv Fichman, and a two part 1959 television portrait called “Glenn Gould: Off the Record” and “Glenn Gould: On the Record.”
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
[(This movie was nominated for review, without further comment, by “Anonymous.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
![Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51LMZHo75bL._SL500_.jpg)